04/24/2001  April 24, 2001 - Washington, D.C. - The US Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has apparently completed its 45-day investigation on the proposed sale of the Silicon Valley Group Inc. to Netherlands-based ASM Lithography Holding N.V.

04/23/2001  April 23, 2001 - San Jose,CA - Numerical Technologies Inc. and Intel Corp. have signed multi-year, multi-million-dollar technology cross-licensing agreement for advanced photolithography solutions used in the production of high-end semiconductors.

04/18/2001  April 18, 2001 - Round Rock, TX & Munich, Germany - DuPont Photomasks, Inc. and Infineon Technologies have agreed to jointly develop advanced photomask technology to support the production of leading edge memory and logic semiconductor devices.

04/06/2001  April 6, 2001 - Tokyo, Japan - Hitachi Ltd. has unveiled a device that reportedly could extend the useful lives of today's steppers into tomorrow's future generations of microprocessors.

03/20/2001  Things got worse fast in Taiwan in last month. Sales at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd, dropped 28% in February from January?s level, while those of United Microelectronics Corp. fell 21%, according to Daiwa Securities Senior Analyst Yasuo Nakane, in his regular report for Nikkei Microdevices.

03/19/2001  March 19, 2001 - At the 26th SPIE Microlithography Symposium, held in Santa Clara, CA in February, the BACUS working group held its traditional panel discussion of reticle-related issues on Monday evening.

03/12/2001  March 12, 2001--Santa Clara, California--IBM Corp. has joined the Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) LLC industry consortium to support the development of EUV lithography technology. EUV lithography technology is being developed to allow semiconductor manufacturers to etch circuit lines smaller than 0.1-micron, creating future generations of more powerful microprocessors and higher density memory chips.

03/08/2001  March 8, 2001--Santa Clara, California--Intel Corp. today announced that its researchers have developed and delivered the first industry-standard format photomasks for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. This marks a significant milestone in the demonstration of EUV as the next generation lithography standard for the semiconductor industry.

03/08/2001  March 8, 2001--Veldhoven, The Netherlands--ASM Lithography Holding N.V. (ASML) and Silicon Valley Group, Inc. (SVG) yesterday confirmed that the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., chaired by the U.S. Treasury Department, has notified the parties that it will conduct a 45-day review, under the Exon-Florio review process, of the potential national security concerns associated with the planned merger of San Jose, CA-based SVG with ASML, located in The Netherlands.

03/02/2001  March 2, 2001--Gaithersburg, Maryland--Larger wafers demand exceedingly accurate measurements of flatness and thickness, while advanced lithography systems require exact assessments of the curvature of the specialized lenses and mirrors used. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed an x-ray optics calibration interferometer device (XCALIBIR) that may help meet these needs.

02/28/2001  February 28, 2001--Santa Clara, California--To help photolithography engineers and IC designers predict the manufacturability of their products before going into production, ASML MaskTools has developed LithoCruiser--a simulation toolset for designing and optimizing lithography processes.

02/26/2001  February 26, 2001--Jupiter, Florida--Photronics, Inc. announced today that its Sub-Wavelength Reticle Solutions phase shift photomasks were recently used as part of a joint development effort that successfully demonstrated the ability to produce sub-100nm features using KrF (248nm) exposure technology.

02/22/2001  February 22, 2001--San Jose, California--KLA-Tencor Corp. today introduced the Archer 10, the latest in its suite of optical metrology overlay tools. Incorporating several significant improvements in automation, throughput, productivity, and precision over previous generation systems, the Archer 10 is one of the industry's most competitive cost-of-ownership overlay solutions for 300mm manufacturing at the sub-0.13-micron node.

02/22/2001  February 22, 2001--Belmont, California--Nikon Corp. has accelerated its Electron Projection Lithography (EPL) development program initiated in 1995 with IBM, based on the determination that major IC manufacturers are relying on the availability of EPL production tools for critical level fabrication at the 70-nm node.

02/22/2001  February 22, 2001--Osaka, Japan--Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. and its semiconductor subsidiary Matsushita Electronics Corp. today announced the development of a 32-bit microcontroller with 512KB flash memory, featuring the industry's lowest power consumption and highest signal processing speed. At the same time, Matsushita announced development of a 512KB mask ROM version of the same 32-bit microcontroller. Shipment of samples is planned for the second quarter of 2001.

02/13/2001  February 12, 2001--Taby, Sweden--Micronic Laser Systems AB recently received a repeat order for a LRS11000 multi-beam laser pattern generator for the production of advanced photomasks for color filters used in TFT-displays.

02/12/2001  FEB. 12 San Jose, California--Numerical Technologies today announced that it has entered into a joint development program with UMC, one of the world's largest semiconductor foundries, to qualify and deploy Numerical's Virtual Stepper system in a high-volume production environment.

02/12/2001  FEB. 12 Jupiter, Florida--Photronics, Inc., a leading photomask supplier, announced today that it has signed a multi-system purchase agreement with Toshiba Machine Co., Ltd. for its EBM-3500 vector scanning electron beam photomask lithography system.

02/08/2001  San Jose, California--Silicon Valley Group (SVG) stockholders have voted, with approximately 99.4% in favor, to approve the proposed merger with ASM Lithography Holding N.V.

02/08/2001  Research Triangle Park, North Carolina--The Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), the chip industry's long-term research consortium, awarded $29.3 million in university research contracts during 2000. New or additional funding went to more than 200 projects at 68 universities.